I fell in love with Sloane Crosley’s Cult Classic the minute I read the summary: Cynical, sarcastic, and engaged, Lola finds herself confronted by the long line of exes in her dating history. She must deal not only with a social situation many of us dread, but with the impact the experience will have on her relationship with her fiance.
Unfortunately, I had a very different image of how this would play out in my head. Possibly because I was checking out The Final Girl Support Group at the same time, I was absolutely certain Cult Classic would find poor Lola in a church community room, burnt coffee in hand, a circle of folding chairs populated with her ex boyfriends.
Sloane, I wouldn’t be mad if you took that idea to rewrite the book. I would barely even ask for a cut of the profit. You’re welcome.
How the book actually plays out is a bonkers work of imagination that never would have crossed my mind, but, alas, I am not from New York City. Crosley’s novel, the protagonist Lola finds herself encountering, night after night, a former relationship - ranging from serious thing to casual fling. She also finds herself, despite her best efforts, returning to the questionable Asian-fusion restuarant where these encounters keep happening.
Eventually we find out that a group of new-age meditators and focusing all their energy on Lola’s past relationships in an effort to orchestrate these seemingly coincidental encounters. Don’t worry, Lola’s just the test run - they plan to scale up and make bank off this.
As wild as the premise was, it only complemented the wild ride I went on personally while reading the book. I almost gave up, not too far into the novel, for two reasons: 1) I felt like it was moving a bit slowly (there’s a lot about ghosts up front that you should be prepared for) and 2) I really hated the main character.
I couldn’t stand Lola. She seemed so…mean. Cynical. Harsh. Prone to poor mistakes over and over again. I powered through and quite suddenly realized…
Lola felt a lot like me.
Specifically, she won me over with this passage, approximately halfway through the book:
I dug until I found one of Jonathan’s old cards. It was dated with a number that made my heart seize. So much time had passed. For a while, any year that began with a “20” felt comfortably contemporary. But now people born in the new millennium were whole people with opinions and degrees, babies even. As such, they were in flagrant violation of this comfort. They were having their own debates, making their own memories, sending their own cards, discovering music with the zeal of the converted. They were walking into parties, hoping their own Jonathans would be there.
A brutally honest version of me, which drastically cooler living situation and a dating history it would take me three lifetimes to match, but still - I saw myself in her. Now, I don’t know if Lola softened through the book or if I grew to like her more simply out of an avoidance of self-hatred, but I ended up loving her character. I gotta tell you, that’s a bit of an eye-opener, and I’m still wrapping my little mind around what it means.
The book itself is creative in a way that sneaks up on you, like accidentally attending one of those interactive theatre productions where the audience is actually supposed to talk about their deep childhood fears or something. The New York Crosley paints is jewel-toned, art-deco, wet cigarette beauty, and I love a novel with casually Jewish characters (casual as in, the Judaism is a fact of the character’s life, not a novelty to be explained to the reader or centered as an integral part of the character’s journey).
Overall rating? 9/10 coffee cups, but keep your therapist on speed dial.
